Lin Zexu was the first person to see the world. He recruited talents to translate foreign books and periodicals. Wei Yuan, a famous thinker of Lin Zexu (1794- 1857), China knew the wise words in the first overseas book "Atlas of Sea Countries". Wei Yuan, a good friend of Lin Zexu, once served as the chief of staff of Jiangsu deployment envoy and governor, and was also a famous scholar who insisted on "seeing the world with his eyes open" at that time. Wei Yuan wrote in his book that the purpose of compiling the Atlas of Sea Countries is as follows in the original narration: "Attack foreigners, pay for them, and learn from them to control them". (Excerpted from the 67th page of Ocean Atlas, Zhongzhou Ancient Books Publishing House, 1999 edition).
Later, Yan Fu translated several western academic works, such as Evolution, Primitive Wealth, Group Learning, The Bound of Group Power, General Explanation of Society, Laws and Meaning, and introduced western evolution, economics, politics and sociology to China systematically.
Wei Yuan is a person who explicitly proposed to learn from the West in the modern history of China. He pointed out in "Description of a Sea Country": What is a book? He said, "attack foreigners with foreigners, pay foreigners with foreigners, and learn from foreigners to control foreigners." The so-called "learning from foreigners" mainly refers to learning a set of strengths of western capitalist countries in military technology. Wei Yuan said: "Three skills of foreigners: one warship, two firearms and three training methods." He not only advocated buying naval guns from the west, but also emphasized introducing advanced industrial technology from the west and manufacturing naval guns himself. The so-called "controlling foreigners" means resisting aggression and defeating the enemy. Wei Yuan explicitly raised the question of whether to learn from the "long skills" of western countries and whether to defeat foreign invaders. He stressed that those who are not good at learning from foreigners should be controlled by foreigners. Starting from the standpoint of anti-aggression, Wei Yuan showed brilliant patriotic thoughts by learning from foreigners and taking conquering foreigners as the goal.
After the Opium War, in the face of the invasion of western powers, some people were frightened by the "strong guns and sharp guns" of the powers, and thought that China could "live in harmony with China and foreign countries" only by making concessions to the outside world and trying its best to meet their demands. There are still some people who are deeply saddened by China's fiasco in the Opium War and demand "anti-foreign" and "anti-foreign", but their methods of "anti-foreign" are outdated and unfeasible. Wei Yuan, on the other hand, not only admits China's backwardness, but also acknowledges that the western powers have their "skills" without losing the courage to resist the aggression of the foreign powers. He believes that as long as China learns the "skills" of the great powers, it will surely defeat the invaders. Based on these two aspects, he put forward the idea of "learning from foreigners to control foreigners". This thought later became the ideological source of learning from the West, which occupied a very important position in the history of China's modern thought and had a very important historical significance.